Aurora HDR Pro for Mac1.2.1

v1.2.8 is now out. Note that the cost of the upgrade to Aurora HDR 2017 may be less than $99 depending upon when you purchased an earlier version. Use the site's interface to check on their offered price for your version.

Just a heads up. The new 2017 version will not open the previous version's mpau files. If you want to make additional edits to the previous version's file, you will need to keep the previous version on your computer. Otherwise you will only be able to edit whatever files that the previous version exported, or start over and recreate them in the new version. If Macphun intends to update Aurora HDR every year, which I can only assume they will, this might be a concern down the road in a few years.

Is the update good for the version that MacUpdate sold with the recent bundle?

I'm in love with Aurora HDR! <3

I always thought that HDR software is something complicated to work with and doesn`t worth money and time at all, but after I purchased Aurora HDR Pro I totally changed my mind! Easy to use tools, variety of presets, smooth interface, and as a result - gorgeous high quality pictures! Will keep exploring it and can`t wait to try out all of the features! I`m completely satisfied with the product and strongly recommend it to others.

The results are just beyond amazing! I`m totally in love with my new images processed in Aurora HDR Pro. It`s absolutely a new level of HDR photos!

Easy and powerful app with friendly interface and impressive results. Great product!

It`s a great HDR software for those who want to make their photos look fantastic without performing any complicated steps. I`m totally impressed by the results I get with Aurora HDR. Strongly recommend!

Aurora HDR Pro is really expanding my horizons!! Love it!!!!

It`s a great HDR software which brings my photos to a whole new level! Will definitely recommend this to my friends!

I love this app. It’s unbelievably easy to use and produces beautiful HDR photos.

Best HDR photo software I ever seen.

Aurora HDR is great!

I use this app for interior photography, think it is just newer and better than LR HDR merge

It works fine with no crashes even in LR or Aperture. I get the photos done in a moment. I didn't need any tutorials for my first try. I love its look and what it makes with my photos taken with my shaky hands )))

This software is total CRAP! I would not recommend it at all. Maybe 6 months or so down the road when they get all the bugs worked out - but as of now it is USELESS! The customer service email responses are nice, but I bought the pro version of this software before it was released and they have done 4 updates to try and get it working and it is still CRAP! I have contacted the customer service people several times and I get the same response - "Please be patient, our people are working on a fix: but there have been 4 updates and so far no fix! Carol Q

This product is wholly unusable to me (both 1.0 and 1.1.1). Invoking Aurora via the Aperture plugin leaves a modal alert window up with no controls whatsover saying "Plugin Started...." with no way to close it, nor any way to do anything in Aperture except Force Quit it. I suppose I could export the RAWs from Aperture and operate on them solely in the application that way but I won't. I'm not going to change my workflow to work around a buggy app. If I need HDR I'll stick with the Photomatix HDR plugin. It's ugly...but it works.

I have bought some of Ratcliff’s tutorials, and I own Macphun’s Intensify as it came with a bundle I bought some years ago, so I’ve been bombarded with news and requests to pre-order. There is a trial version so I gave this a go. Aurora HDR will do nothing good for me personally, I find it rather pointless. Someone mentioned how Macphun is good at marketing, this is exactly why they went to Mr. Ratcliff who is also extremely good at marketing and hype. If you’re like me it’ll tickle your curiosity enough to test it, for others they might think they’re buying the holy grail of HDR, but really I am doubtful. The experience of using this is very similar to Photomatix: you have a bunch of sliders but no idea what they are actually doing, so you click around brainlessly having no clue which does what, until you get to a point where you’re so confused about what you’ve done that you think it’s time to stop. You tweak it a little bit more until you think it doesn’t look too horrible and you’re done. One of the big selling points is how fast that application is. For me it isn’t. I have a top of the line brand new 5K 27inch iMac with almost all options maxed out: fastest CPU, fastest GPU with 4GB of RAM, SSD, etc. I loaded 3 bracketed exposures, ticked alignment and reduce chromatic aberration and clicked okay. It took a long time, seemed stuck at 75% of the chromatic aberration process though no sign of the app crashing, it was just chugging at 300% CPU. After 15 minutes I had to leave for a game of tennis. When I came back after 1h+ it was finally done, yay! (PS: I didn’t have that problem with other sets of images that I’ve tried, but if it did it once it will do it again). I reset the settings, it looked bad but less horrible than my first try with a first set of images. I zoomed in 100% and there I noticed also that Aurora isn’t that fast then: span around a big file at 100% and it’ll be no faster than Photomatix or other plugins. It’s certainly much slower than the HDR function of Lightroom on the same set of images. It leaves me scratching my head somehow. Yes, there’s layers and masking, but I have no incentive to go that far because I find the first part of the workflow vastly random. Seeing the results, I also cannot justify spending the money on this (I’ve funded Trey Ratcliff’s luxurious lifestyle enough already ;)) Does one really need a dedicated HDR software these days anyway?

Hey all. Aurora HDR trial is available on our site: aurorahdr.com You're welcome to share your thoughts and feedback here, and we'll do our best to keep you happy. Have a great day. Alex.

Could someone please tell me why there is such a hefty price difference between Appstore and here? Isn't it the same product or is it on sale on Appstore? Thanks. Fariborz AMIRSHAHI - Verona (Italy)

Positives:I really like the company (Macphun) and the user interface design and feature set of the tool. Negatives: The results are horrible with Olympus RAW files. I compared with Photomatix 5.1 (another HDR tool) and Aurora HDR delivered garish colors (no adjustment of color temp or tint would help) and exaggerated HDR effects (I used a -3, 0, +3 bracket). I'm more after natural looking HDR - the product was co-developed by a person who is known for surrealistic applications of HDR - this seems to have led to a product that may be more useful for those types of images vs. my objective to preserve a more natural look and feel. The de-ghosting option led to numerous strange artifacts - I had initially turned it on to deal with small branches of trees shifting in the wind, which led to large areas of the background sky looking like spotted cows. Summary: I don't see how this tool can be salvaged - it's only a version 1, but several parts of the core engine (color, HDR algorithm, de-ghosting) are vastly inferior to the "one click" experience I'm accustomed to from another tool. Furthermore, despite offering numerous strong options, there is no way to select the HDR approach appropriate for a particular image (unlike HDR Projects Professional or Photomatix). Disclaimer: Most of the other Macphun products get solid 5 stars from me (highly recommended). This one isn't ready for prime time and should not have been shipped as-is.

Macphun has stepped into the arena of HDR photography with a very strong and stable application, offering features not found in other leading apps for HDR imagery. The company states that the application is fast, and it is: I opened a series of five brackets (Nikon NEF [RAW], 5.4 MB each) in approximately fourteen seconds, from the point of selecting the options I wanted to apply to the brackets, to the display of the image onscreen, including aligning the images and tone-mapping them to a "default" HDR image. In addition to the standard panels you might expect, Aurora also offers image radiance (an HDR glow), glow (a more standard glow effect), top and bottom lighting, tone curve, color filter, color toning, and vignette. These features eliminate the need to open the image in another editor post-merge. All adjustments were extremely responsive, rendering very quickly. A feature that is unique to Aurora is the concept of layers: you can add the same image as a new layer, make adjustments to that layer, then mask it. This allows different styles of tone-mapping for different sections of the image, selective denoising, selective detail and contrast adjustments, and selective color-toning. If you own other titles, you owe it to yourself to try Aurora HDR; if you are new to HDR photography, you should definitely make it one of the applications you test as you search for an HDR solution.